by Lakota Grace
I tried to picture this big house filled with ping-pong balls scattering in all directions. No, from the sound of it, Heinrich practiced a darker kind of chemistry.
Fancy stopped in front of a closed door toward the back of the house. She fit one key into a padlock hanging from a metal latch. We passed into a small, enclosed entryway, perhaps four feet square. Lights flashed on automatically at our entrance. A circulating fan whirred to speed as the door shut behind us, forming a negative pressure. The small entry room created a buffer for noxious fumes that might otherwise enter the main house.
Fancy fit another key into the lock of a second door at the far side of the vestibule. A rush of musty air rushed to meet us as we entered the lab proper. The room was long and narrow, with high clerestory windows and a huge ventilation hood hovering from the ceiling. The double-door barrier blanketed the room with stillness. With the new air circulation, an acrid smell permeated the air.
Maple cabinets with black rubber counters lined the walls. I touched one surface and recoiled at the greasy smear on my finger. I wiped it hastily on my pant leg. Dim sunlight glinted off retorts and glass test tubes, some still holding a dark residue in the rounded bottoms.
A row of Bunsen burners was tethered to a strip of gas outlets on the wall above the counter. I sniffed but caught no scent of gas. Papers were scattered across the counter as though a complicated test were in progress, but a thick layer of dust covered everything. This lab had not been used for some time.
I walked over to the counter and casually reached for the papers.
Fancy intervened. “Please don’t touch anything. Heinrich absolutely forbids it.”
I walked along, hands behind my back as requested. It seriously hampered my snooping style.
I sneezed, disturbing the dust layer. Row after row of glass bottles lined the shelves—some clear, some amber colored, with tight stoppers. Nothing was labeled “Arsenic.” Didn't mean it wasn't there, though. As I walked farther into the lab, the air turned foul. My vision blurred and an instant headache throbbed at my temples.
“I detest coming in here,” Fancy said. “Air giving you problems?”
I coughed in assent. She walked to the end of the room and unlocked a final door that led to the outside. We walked into a semi-shaded garden. Even in the heat of the day, it was cool, with high velvet mesquite trees arching overhead. Filtered sunlight drifted across a small pond, and a covey of quail dashed to cover beneath lavender, bee-filled Russian sage.
“Nice garden,” I said.
“Thanks. Hardly anyone comes back here now except me.” Fancy visibly relaxed as she dropped to a red sandstone bench. She patted the seat next to her and I sat.
“See there?” She pointed to a bed of spiky-leafed plants. “I’ve planted some hybrid iris— there are a ruffled peach and gold bi-color and a deep red that’s a re-bloomer. The corms won’t bloom until next spring, but they’re worth the wait. I love flowers. Never had any when I was growing up.”
It was a side of Fancy that she hadn’t shared before.
“Mind if I smoke?” she asked.
Without waiting for my answer, she reached into her pocket and withdrew a pack. She lit one, breathed a puff of smoke into the air, and sighed. A bucket of sand next to the bench was piled high with butts, evidence that she came here often.
“No! Get out of here. Shoo!”
Fancy’s birthmark splashed deep purple against her pale cheek as she reached down and lobbed a good-sized rock at a gray-and-white cat prowling about the garden. The stone hit its hind leg, hard.
The cat yelped once and limped into the brush.
“Ouch. That had to hurt,” I said.
Fancy seemed to notice my judgmental tone. “That cat buries turds in my garden. I catch it here again, I’ll kill it.” She pulled a bit of tobacco off her lip with a precise gesture. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that, of course.”
Of course. “Who has keys to the chemistry lab?” I asked.
“Heinrich installed the locks when Marguerite began giving her soirees. Said he didn't want the whole world with access to his work. So he’s got keys. Marguerite, too, probably. She’s got her nose into everything. Then the ring of keys that hangs in the kitchen.”
“Heinrich’s not worked in the lab for a while?”
Fancy shook her head. “He had a series of small strokes. All of a sudden the Riordans showed up—mother and daughter. Then about a month ago, the doctor. Convenient, that. I always wondered about that. Dr. Theo Riordan, a doctor, just when Heinrich needed medical help…”
Fancy took another draw on her cigarette and I looked at her sideways. Up close, she had a hardness about her face, lines where there shouldn't be any. My grandfather used to call that “rode hard, put up wet.” It couldn't be easy for her, taking care of the rigid German chemist.
Fancy stubbed out the cigarette and rose abruptly. “Time to be getting back. Heinrich will be waking soon. You can reach the front parking lot that way.” She pointed to a gate at the far end of the garden. Before I could respond, she had turned and re-entered the chemistry lab. She locked the door carefully behind her.
The lab had yielded no sign of arsenic, but we could return with a court order if necessary and have a closer look. My meeting with Marguerite could wait, too, since the “man with a gun” was no longer at the ranch.
It was time for me to check on Hank Battle before the confrontation at the irrigation ditch slipped from his memory.
Chapter 14
During my stay at the Spine Ranch, the hot sun had turned the inside of my parked Jetta into a sauna. Black upholstery—good in winter, bad in summer. I held my breath, opened all windows, and turned the AC up to max. Then I steered the wheel with my palms until it was cool enough inside to breathe again.
At the Battle farm, Hank's old truck was parked by his trailer, but I turned right instead and parked the Jetta in front of Serena's house. The irrigation ditch was running full, the gush of water cooling the summer air. Maybe Ray Morales had opened the floodgates at the Spine Ranch, letting the waters flow again. Smart man.
Serena answered my knock. “I heard you drive up. Come in.”
I followed her into the house, small in comparison to the Spine mansion. I sat on the same dusty couch I had the first time I was here. I didn’t like conflict—no cop did—but Serena’s blind spot when it came to her brother was going to cause trouble.
She perched on the edge of a small chair opposite me, a stubborn expression on her face. “Hank told me what happened at the ranch. He didn't mean anything by it. He gets carried away sometimes.”
“Well, this time he was waving a crowbar around. That’s dangerous.”
“Hank was just protecting what is rightfully ours. Anyway, no charges are being filed, are they?”
She seemed unconcerned. Someone must have called her from the ranch. Unlikely as it seemed, the Battle family might have allies there. Ray, perhaps. Or even Fancy or Amanda? It was possible.
I tried again. “Serena, Hank was threatening people. He's out of control.”
“No, you don't know my brother. Folks around here have learned to live with his moods. We didn't have any trouble— that is, until the Riordans moved in.”
“Now you’re blaming Hank’s problems on the water shortage?”
“Why not? Heinrich’s got plenty of water. And yet he insists on using ours, too. I think Marguerite puts him up to it.” Her fists clenched, white-knuckled.
She noticed me looking at them and hid her hands under a fold of her skirt.
“My brother was different before.”
She gestured toward a bookshelf where a picture of a smiling Hank stood beside Serena and an older man—their father?
“Hank took AP classes all through high school—knew that he wanted a career in agriculture since he was four. He had this uncanny ability to connect with anything on four legs—horses, our pigs and goats, even wild creatures.” Tears glinted in her eyes.
I
contrasted the smiling boy in the picture to the unkempt, confused man I confronted earlier in the day. I hesitated. Perhaps Serena was right.
“We’ll leave it at a warning for now,” I said slowly. “But if Heinrich Spine files a formal complaint against Hank, I’ll have no option but to arrest him.”
“I'll watch him closer, I promise.”
I left the farm with a troubled mind. Serena could say what she wanted, but the situation was dangerously unstable. Like those bottles in Heinrich's chemistry lab: Inert chemicals collecting dust in a vacant room, but enter a catalyst and the roof could blow off. Maybe the Battles, brother and sister, were that catalyst to violence. I hoped not.
It was early afternoon, and my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten lunch. I thought about Beto's and then remembered my lagging feet and winded breath on the dash across the bull’s paddock. Maybe it was time to eat healthier.
I pulled into a grocery store parking lot. Inside, I filled a plastic container with healthy greens at the salad bar and picked up a diet Coke. Then I drove out to the picnic area near Montezuma's Well.
The Well had nothing to do with the Aztec chieftain who had never visited Arizona, but rather, was a natural limestone sinkhole filled from springs that created a cool blue-green pool in the crater. The little lake held unique species of leeches and water scorpions, but fish couldn’t survive there, because the calcium carbonate levels were too high. A local entrepreneur discovered this much to his consternation when he tried to stock it as a trout farm. Nevertheless, it was a great place for a midday stop.
The tall cottonwoods formed a green ring around a grassy picnic area, their summer leaves rustling overhead. I stepped over an old irrigation ditch carrying water from Montezuma’s Well to farmlands before it reentered Wet Beaver Creek. The walls of the ditch were hardened limestone, leached from the mineral-rich water of the Well. The sound of the water soothed me as I sat in the shade, munching on my greens, rabbit-like.
I rang Shepherd to fill him in on happenings at the Spine Ranch, but there was no answer on his cell. I'd catch him tonight at the Mingus sheriff's station and we'd have this out. One way or the other, he needed to focus on the job, not this crazy obsession of his.
And the job was figuring out who might have killed Gil Streicker. The Riordan women, Marguerite and Amanda, were possible candidates. So were Serena Battle and her brother, Hank.
I couldn’t rule out Ray Morales. He seemed calm, but there could have been a disagreement. And Raven LightDancer? I knew next to nothing about the man, except for the innuendos that Amanda had hurled. Still too many unanswered questions. I dumped the remains of the uneaten salad in the trash and returned to my car.
I’m usually good with directions, but the ones that Fancy had given me to Dr. Theo Riordan’s trailer made no sense at all. I turned off I-17 at the Sedona exit, then turned west down a narrow paved road. At about the two-mile mark, I crossed over Red Tank Draw, a dry slash in the red earth. And a half-mile beyond that, I drove over another bridge at the Wet Beaver Creek.
The road switched to dirt just after the creek and then forked in a T-intersection. To the left was a sign to a private boy’s school and to the right was the entrance to the V Bar V Ranch. No longer a working ranch, it was designated a Heritage Site because of the petroglyph cliff located there. Nothing either direction looked promising for the trailer that Fancy had described.
I U-turned and rattled back across the bridge and into a day-use picnic area. Maybe someone here knew where Dr. Riordan lived. The parking lot was full, with only the “Service Vehicles” spot vacant. I pulled into it and got out to stretch my legs.
A lanky man wearing khaki Bermuda shorts, a pocketed vest, and an orange T-shirt emerged from the Camp Host trailer. He waved his arms wildly. “Hey! You can’t park there. It’s reserved.”
“Sorry, I just need some directions.”
I knelt down to pet the camp cat, a well-fed orange tabby missing half of one ear. He sniffed me once, put his tail in the air, and stalked off, his ample belly swaying from side to side. I bet he had a good diet of camp scraps and didn’t have to settle for spinach and kale salad.
As the man drew closer, I pulled out my badge. “Pegasus Quincy, sheriff’s department.”
“Oh! I thought you folks drove official vehicles.” He looked scornfully at my dusty car. “How can I help you?”
A good start would be not dissing my Jetta. “I’m looking for a Dr. Theo Riordan. He’s supposed to be camping somewhere around here.”
The camp host pulled off a baseball cap and wiped the sweat off his brow. “He better not be camping in these grounds. It’s a Day Park only. No overnights. Kids sneak in here at night, and I have to run them off.” He pointed to the sign at the entrance: “See? Says right there, ‘day use only’. Makes my job a lot tougher when people don’t pay attention.”
“Must be hard,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic. “Say, I could use some water. You don’t have a vending machine or anything here, do you?”
“Sorry. No electricity, no machines. This is a picnic area. Most people prefer it that way.”
His tone implied I should know that. My parched throat didn’t care. It needed water. I debated asking whether he might have some in that fancy camper of his but decided not to. Accommodating thirsty law officers probably wasn’t in the camp rulebook.
The wind shifted and shadows darkened the park as clouds deepened overhead. I looked up. “Thought June was too early for the monsoon rains.”
The camp host shook his head. “These are from a subtropical depression in the Baja Peninsula. Bad news.”
“Why? I thought rain was good for the desert.”
He looked at me as though I was a tourist, asking too many dumb questions. I felt like one. The sun beat down on my bare head, and a nascent sunburn tightened the bridge of my nose.
“This year we've already had bad fires on the Mogollon Rim to the north of us,” he said. “When the forests burn, pine needles drop to the ground and form this waxy coating. Water runs right off it. A flash flood can hit in the mountains and within minutes, that little stream you see there can rise bank to bank.”
The clear limpid flow of the small creek in front of us seemed an unlikely place for a flood, with little kids playing in the shallows, hopping from rock to rock, and diving off into the deeper pools.
I pointed at a glint of silver under a sycamore beyond the far side of the park. “What’s that?”
The host whipped out pocket binoculars and peered at the shape. He didn’t bother to share the view with me.
“Looks like a trailer. Might be your guy. If it is, he’s parked illegally. You should arrest him.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Out of the park boundaries. Not my responsibility.”
I wished my job was that easily defined.
I thanked him and left. I backtracked to a turnoff I’d missed. Maybe this was it. The rutted, dirt road angled back toward the creek. About five hundred yards in, the humped silver shape of an old Airstream trailer emerged from the shadows. The area near the creek was damp and cool, and cicadas buzzed in a nearby grove of cottonwoods.
Dr. Theo Riordan greeted me at the front steps of his trailer, holding a plate and glass. The doctor was in his mid-fifties, on the plump side, with a florid round face and a buzz cut balanced by a stubby white beard. He wore Teva river-runner sandals, a white T-shirt and Bermuda shorts. A birder's olive-green, broad-brimmed hat completed the outfit. The good doctor had gone native.
“Good morning, Officer,” he said. “Fancy called and said you might be along.” He put his dishes down on a picnic table and held out a big hand. “Theodore Riordan at your service. Call me Dr. Theo.”
It was a cool, slightly damp handshake from the glass he’d been holding.
“Pull up a chair,” Dr. Theo said. “I was just starting lunch. Want to join me?”
“Just some water,” I said, being virtuous.
He ent
ered the trailer for a moment and came out with another big glass of ice water. He sat in a camp chair across from me and dived into his sandwich with gusto. Remembering the discarded salad, I looked at the homemade bread, ham, and cheese with envy.
The creek bubbled over a red sandstone ledge beyond the trailer, and a Crissal thrasher warbled a rich phrase of song in the alder branch across the water. Easy to see why he liked it here.
I brought my mind back to law enforcement with difficulty. “The camp host across the way says you’re parked illegally.”
“What does he know?” Dr. Theo said, gesturing about him. “This land is free for everyone. Free air. Free water.”
“But…”
He shook a finger at me in mock disapproval. “Don’t believe everything you hear. Dr. Spine owns this land. He gives me permission to park here as long as I want.”
I considered returning to the campground to let the site host know. Nah, let him stew about rule-breakers. He seemed to be good at that.
“You know about the fire at the ranch,” I said. “Gil Streicker, the ranch manager died.”
“My daughter Amanda told me. Sorry to hear it.”
I took another sip of water. “You mind if I take a few notes?”
Dr. Theo waved at me with half a sandwich. “Fire away. I’ve got no secrets.”
“Amanda tells me that you and your wife are separated.”
“In a way. I still keep an eye on her, balance her bank account, that sort of thing. Marguerite is somewhat of a spendthrift. Oh, that reminds me. She was going shopping in Phoenix today and hasn't checked in. Just a moment.”
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and manipulated the touchscreen. A map flashed up. He enlarged it with thumb and forefinger and studied it for a moment. Then he smiled, closed the connection, and tucked the phone back in his pocket.
“Her phone is registering at the ranch. She must have changed her mind about the trip.”
“You keep track of where she is?”